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Chen House in Taiwan by Marco Casagrande/Frank Chen

May 20, 2009

The Chen House in North Taiwan, design and constructed by Finnish architect Marco Casagrande and Taiwanese architect Frank Chen, was built for an older couple who wanted to retire to the country and grow bamboo and cherry trees – on a flood plain also beset by hurricanes and earthquakes.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, design, favourite, landscaping, Uncategorised

Plywood in Paris loft

May 18, 2009

This Paris loft was renovated by architects Karine Chartier and Thomas Corbasson who trained in the studio of Jean Nouvel (last year’s Pritzker Award winner). The space is an old industrial laboratory – you can see the building’s original freight elevator below.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Takashi Iwasaki – embroidery art

Takashi Iwasaki‘s March show in Vancouver was postponed, so we’re doing our own little show here. Iwasaki, who was born in Japan and studied in both Japan and Canada, also produces paintings and drawings but it’s his embroideries that are particularly interesting, not just because it’s nice to see embroidery being done by a male artist, but also because of their unconventional, non-fussy style – he somehow bends the medium to make embroidery lines appear loosely hand-painted or drawn, so that there’s an interesting disjunction between method and effect.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

May 17, 2009

Photos are all from the 1975 edition of Inside Today’s Home by Ray and Sarah Faulkner, Holt Rinehart Winston. (The 1954, 1960 and 1968 editions of this book are all worth collecting too, if you can find them on abebooks.) The word “today” somehow sounded more optimistic then than it does now, though of course back then you did have the bomb to consider.

Categories: architect, architecture, art, craft, design, furniture, interiors, landscaping, textiles, Uncategorised

Converted churches, Part 2: Belgium, England, Australia

May 15, 2009

Here are three converted churches which seem much more successful than most of the examples in the last post. Above is a 19th century chapel in the Flemish village of Bazel which has been converted into 2 loft-type houses.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Discuss.

May 14, 2009

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Architecture in the movies, part 2.

May 12, 2009

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Architecture in the movies, part 1.

May 11, 2009

This list, inspired by an interesting thread on pushpullbar, is a small selection of great modern buildings that have appeared in 20th C film.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Bloomingdales 1970s display rooms by Barbara D’Arcy

More photos from “The Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating,” 1973, by Barbara D’Arcy. These displays – a Japanese room, a psychedelic red room and a room done in a sort of wild Tudor hunting lodge style – were built inside Bloomingdales in the late 60s or early 70s.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Bart Prince

May 10, 2009

Buildings by the Albuquerque-based architect Bart Prince. The top photographs show the house he built for Joe Price, a collector of Edo-era Japanese art and design. This is a small sample of photos of his work from the April 2009 issue of Wallpaper Magazine (a really good issue).

Categories: design, Uncategorised

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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

Uncategorised

Chen House in Taiwan by Marco Casagrande/Frank Chen

Plywood in Paris loft

Takashi Iwasaki – embroidery art

When “today” had the ring of “tomorrow”

Converted churches, Part 2: Belgium, England, Australia

Discuss.

Architecture in the movies, part 2.

Architecture in the movies, part 1.

Bloomingdales 1970s display rooms by Barbara D’Arcy

Bart Prince

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